Ok, I wanna talk about Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody. Seems like this team is highly regarded in Hollywood, and I'm sort of flummoxed.

Thank You For Smoking: I loved this one, and it's telling that it was Reitman's first feature and was not made with Diablo Cody. It's all been downhill since then.

Juno was twee garbage.

Up in the Air was decent enough, but so much of it felt forced and trite, like when George and Vera are discussing their various rewards cards with such enthusiasm. Altogether entertaining and with a nice somber quality, but nothing amazing. The other one done without Diablo Cody (from a script by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on a novel by Walter Kirn), this one has some real stakes with the subplot about the suicide, but its treated with such carelessness so as to render its impact flaccid.

Young Adult was pretty good; Charlize and Patton turned in some really great performances. So shitty how it ends, though: After Charlize's spending the last twenty years of her life, and 90 minutes of the film, being a selfish fuckup, her high school acquaintance assures her that she is cooler than everyone else in their high school, and that she should just get on with her life; Charlize simply agrees.

Tully was trash. Charlize delivered a perfectly fine performance, but it's not enough to save this mess. Reitman took a great premise for a film -- let's cast an unflinching gaze on the realities of maternity/birth/postpartum depression -- and turned it into schlock. Reitman constantly undermines his own subject matter, by having nearly-believable characters behave in unbelievable ways, and then of course with the final twist...

Witness Mackenzie Davis, as she quotes obscure poetry and speaks a little Japanese, and delivers this doozy of a line: "if a barnacle latches into a whale, it's harmless; it's just an obligate parasite doing its thing." Sounds like a line of dialogue he had left over from Juno and was so excited to finally use it that he crammed it in there.

The twist was just so awful, completely ruined what could have been a fairly impactful look at a topic that hasn't gotten enough coverage.

Largely speaking, Reitman has this recurring theme in his films where everyone is a complete mess and incapable of finding their way out of a cardboard box, until some magical hipster shows up and dispenses with some pseudo-cool wisdom that seems to put his heroes back on track...but to where? They never end up anywhere better or worse, just more or less damages in the same ways as when their journeys began.

With Thank You For Smoking, Aaron Eckhart is that voice of reason amidst the conflict-heavy world of lobbying, and it's one of two times I think it worked.

In Juno, the lead titular character's dad doesn't seem too upset about his teen daughter's pregnancy, because it provides the perfect opportunity for him to drop this little wisdom nuggets at the family dinner table.

With Up In the Air, it's Vera Farmiga's character who brings all sorts of deep insights into Clooney's life, until we learn in the end that she is completely full of shit. Danny McBride serves an extra helping of "wisdom from an ordinary schlub," and it's not a good look for him.

In Young Adult, Patton Oswalt's character does work because of his backstory (suffering a crippling injury at the hands of some bullies when he was in high school). He's a guy who has some wisdom, he just doesn't have the gumption to apply it to his own life.

I just don't understand why people love Reitman's films. They're technically very proficient -- some strong performances, serviceable camera work and lighting, good choice of music cues -- but they're so hollow. So many empty people being positioned as lost souls worthy of the viewers' empathy, and with such unrealistic dialogue being presented as homespun wisdom by characters who can't otherwise demonstrate any sort of life mastery. The two strongest characters in all the films I've mentioned are Eckhart in Thank You For Smoking, a character whose mental gymnastics require a certain hollowness for ease of flexibility; and Patton Oswalt in Young Adult, a guy not hollow per se, but deeply broken, certainly capable of wisdom even if he doesn't have the spine to apply it to life himself.

Apart from those two characters, it's frustrating to watch Reitman prop everyone else up on these pillars of bad decisions, poor common sense, and shitty motivations; and then try to surround them with these manufactured moments that are somehow supposed to cast them in more empathetic light. I think Reitman kind of hates people, because he doesn't seem to trust that they can act with any sort of moral compass, nor can they learn from their mistakes; and he has no respect for his audience, because he assumes that despite all this, the viewers will still root for them.

I'm kind of angry that this guy gets to enjoy the success he has.